1. Give Testimonials

If you’re using a product or service that you love (or at least like), consider sending them a testimonial.

When you do, make sure to tell them that they can put it on their homepage or a testimonial page.

To show that you’re a real person they’ll often put a link to your site for you…without you even having to ask.

Make no mistake, you can get some baller backlinks from testimonials (here’s one on a DA89 website):

And here’s another example of a testimonial page from a DA86 site:

When I see an authority site with testimonial links I sometimes buy their product just to give a testimonial and get a link.

(That’s how powerful this is)

2. Find Golden Link Opportunities From “Best Of” Blog Posts

Click “Play” to see how it works:

1:09

3. Blogger Reviews

If you have a software product, information product, consulting service or ANYTHING of value that you sell, you can easily turn that into handfuls of high-quality backlinks.

How?

By offering it to bloggers for free.

Here’s how:

1. Find bloggers in your niche that might be interested in what you have to offer. If you sell an information product that teaches people how to make their own soaps, you’d Google things like “soap making”, “make soap at home” etc.

2. Your results will be a mixed bag of mommy bloggers, hippie bloggers, and sites like ehow.

Filter out any major authority sites or news sites. You’ll be left with a solid list bloggers that might be interested in your offer, like this one:

3. Reach out to them with this email script:

Hey [Site Owner Name],

I was searching for [Some Homemade Soap Recipes] today when I came across [Website].

Awesome stuff!

Actually, I just launched a guide that [Teaches People How To Make Luxury Soaps At Home]. I usually charge [$X], but I’d be more than happy to send it over to you on the house. All I’d ask is that you’d consider mentioning it on your blog or writing a review.

Let me know how that sounds.

Cheers,[Your First Name]

You want to be VERY careful about the language you use for this strategy.Note how I don’t ask for a link or review…which would violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

I just send them the product and let them decide if it’s worth a mention on their blog.

4. Link Roundups

Hit “Play” to see how you can use link roundups to build quality backlinks:

0:53

5. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation is simple:

First, you find mentions of your company and products that don’t link back to you.

Here’s an example:

Then you email the person with a friendly reminder to add your link.

Very simple…but very, very powerful.

See how the author of that article mentioned backlinko.com….but didn’t link to it?

That’s where link reclamation comes into play.

Instead of saying “oh shucks, I wish they linked to me”, you proactively reach out and ask them to link.

You see, when people mention you in an article, they (usually) like you.

(That’s true even if they didn’t add a backlink to your site)

A simple friendly reminder email is usually enough for them to log into WordPress and add your link.

Hey Brian, this is an absolutely fabulous post! It caused me to come out of lurking mode on the Warrior Forum and post a response there as well. Only my second post in 4 years, it was that kickass… I’ve signed to your newsletter on the strength of this. You have a new follower on Twitter as well! I mean what I said on the Warrior Forum… Since 2001 I’ve worked in an SEO commercially, freelance and now from the comfort of my own home – I have bought IM ebooks with less useful information in them than covered by any one of your 17. You might not please everyone in our industry giving some of those secrets away for free though! All power to you my friend, you deserve success and lots of it!

Dude, that’s crazy you are sharing this stuff. Reading your list was sort of like a BS cleaner from all the linkbuilding techniques I have been reading on.

In the spirit of passing it on. There a tool called Justdropped.com, it gets me a list of expired domains and then I use a service that auto checks PR for that huge list. In a couple of hours I can usually identify 4-5 domains with high PR that have expired.

Then after that, I just rebuild the page with the URL structure that had links pointing to it.

I’ve nothing to express my feeling with your great contribution, Brian. Your method does enlight my way to do more great SEO to the portfolio of my niche site empire. As Tim said, you deserved to be hated from real IMers cuz of sharing such a great secret publicly 🙂

Hey,
I have question regarding the Fiverr backlink. Google has successfully banned many public networks, so how is paying $5 for a contextual link different from from using services like Build My Rank?

Kind regards,
Andrii

P.S
Awesome article! I already created an audio file and uploaded it on those 4 services.

Haha… I just find it a little ironic that you mention “get links from Real Sites… not blog network… spam”, when you mention earlier in your post to create your own blog network of… basically not Real Sites 🙂 I get what you mean, but it’s funny.

PUBLIC blog networks i can see causing some problems, but you can create a PBN (Private Blog Network) which i assume avoids googles spiders etc – Or at least they are meant to!

I read something about this yesterday and you put some code in your .htaccess file to block software from scanning your website, so i assume a private blog network is a safe route to take when creating your own ‘fake’ sites.

Is this correct?

Brian Dean

PBNs have their own set of problems, Andrew. They can help a little, but I wouldn’t try to rank a site with PBNs alone.

I had the same problem. I created a game in Sploder, but couldn’t download it or extract it in any way. I tried Padbuilder, but it only created a text file. When it was downloaded to .xml it wasn’t the best looking thing.

And I’ve tried some of the software sharing directories you have given us in the comments. No luck so far. I guess I’ll try the other methods. The Audio links are easy, but there is still no change.

Yes you’re right Lewis. They must have changed that recently. Considering that it doesn’t take long to build links and the traffic potential I’d still use Scoop.It. Besides, nofollow links still pass some juice.

Brian, big thanks, great article for sure. I have a question for you. Most of the domains you recommend to post links on have high PR, however the actual internal pages that will contain our links have a PR of 0-1. Doesn’t that devalue the links too much? Is it worth it to put so much effort for PR 0-1 links?

Thanks, Just after asking the question I read the article you reference. It did address my question very well. Do you think a PR0 dofollow link on a big authoritative PR 6-7 domain is worth more than a PR2-3 do follow link on a niche PR 2-3 domain site. I am having trouble quantifying the value of authority and trust in a reasonable way. Can you suggest any ways to estimate the comparative value of a backlink based on specific metrics?
I will read your Google trust article and try to come up with more specific questions as it seems relevant.

Definitely not. A PR2-3 niche relevant link is worth more than a PR0 link on an authoritative site. The point I was making that was when comparing pages with similar PR, it’s also important to take note of the domain the page sits on.

Unfortunately, there’s no “Big Metric” that takes into account domain authority, trust, link location, relevancy and the 100 other factors Google uses to evaluate a link. You gotta use your head : )

hi whats the etiquette for infographics do the sites you guest post these on supply a source link after?
do you stipulate you want linking back to or is it general practise the same as normal guest posting

If natural then there is not a problem I would assume. For example a great article like this one could naturally achieve many links fast and naturally. However, if it was spammed then obviously you have some problems…Another example is natural disaster or event create many links rapidly in a few minutes or days…

Brian Dean

Exactly, Brian. It’s normal to get an super high influx of links. The most important thing (as you said) is for the links to be legit and natural.

Brian,
First off, thanks for the great content. Your link building techniques are second to none. Are you going to be offering any paid services in the near future for lazy asses like myself?
Second, a question for you. What tool do you use that gives you the detailed link profiles of sites that you show screenshots for?
Third, regarding domain auctions, I can’t seem to find info like age of domain and link profiles of said domains. Is that something that has to be done manually on an individual basis, or do some of these domain auction sites provide that information?
Thanks again!
Ed

+1 for an outsourcing guide using proven methods from Brian Dean.
I am not lazy and a big believer in doing all SEO and promotional work in-house/myself, but there are only so many hours in the day and I need to work on product and customer development as well. I need to be able to match the efforts of bigger companies in my space.

OpenSiteExplorer.org from Moz is great for checking URL profiles (and your competitors backlinks).

Thanks Lilia. I’m also a hand-on type of person. But considering how much time this type of quality link building takes, it makes sense to outsource some of the process so you can focus on your core business. I agree: reverse engineering your competitor’s links is an awesome way to find top-notch link building opportunities.

Brian,
When searching for expired domains, which is more important? The PageRank, the age or the number of links it has? I’m going through ExpiredDomains.net and see many available with high PR but no links and only 1 year old. Or vice versa, low PR but high number of links and older.
Thanks,
Ed